That said, I would also say that medicine should be confirmed to be effective without overly deleterious side-effects.
This brings up a bugbear of mine. There are people who say they use 'natural' remedies (or, indeed, unnatural but alternate ones) because "they don't have side-effects".
Yes, something can have greater or lesser amounts of side-effects, to counterbalance the intended curative action (I don't reach for pain-killers for minor aches, personally, because I'd rather not dull the pain of a strain and end up straining it even more, but I know that's not a view subscribed to by everyone
1), but if something doesn't have
any side-effects, then it likely doesn't even have
effects. Please protect me from those who are selling new-age snakeoils that have a psychokinetic ability to cure high blood-pressure, low blood-pressure, both types of diabetes, under/over-reactive thyroids and any other number of individual ailments without regard to how they're apparently not swinging other biological factors (that they otherwise promise to raise/lower, on demand) out of whack, or whether the exactly opposing effect perhaps is happens, but only for those with the exact opposite problem.
...also a 'chemical' (as if all the rest aren't chemicals, strictly, unless it's an impossibly dilute solution where the only chemical of relevance is H
2O) can generally be purer and thus less adulterated by potentially nasty compounds, compared to 'natural extracts'. Especially since the realisation following the errors with thalidomide, when even chirality is investigated and properly selected for...
1 Yes, occasionally there's a pain related to some movement or other that causes me to tense up in automatic, which might be doing me more damage to the affected joint than if I just had a dull ache that didn't. I'm not saying I've made a
totally rational decision, there...